When he walked out his Leslieville front door early one morning nine years ago, he saw that his van had disappeared under a collage of spray-painted signatures, or tags. “It was like a fresh kill for the hyenas,” recalls Mr. Dunn, who used the van to transport construction equipment and materials to and from contracting projects.

It was like a fresh kill for the hyenas

While much has been written about the swirls of paint that often emblazon highway pillars, the back doors of restaurants and trendy neighbourhood alleyways, white delivery trucks are as frequent a target, and there is no easy deterrent in sight for frustrated owners.

“Once I got tagged the first time I knew it was going to be an ongoing thing,” Mr. Dunn says, and he was right. His van, parked overnight on a quiet residential street, was targeted seven more times in the next year and a half. It had become a pawn in a branding competition among youth and street artists that kicks off long after nosy neighbours have pulled up their sheets and drawn their shades.

Graffiti vandalism can be a costly infection. According to an amended by-law on graffiti put into force by city council on Jan. 1, 2012, the city can force defiant owners who don’t clean up the mess to pay for city services to do so. That includes owners of graffiti-covered vehicles, though they aren’t targeted by bylaw officers very often, said a city representative. Either way, the victim foots the bill.

It’s too high a price for Mario Alexander, a driver for St. Andrew’s Poultry in Kensington Market. His truck is ingloriously adorned with aged layers of symbols and tags: it has been devoured by green, silver, red and orange paint so many times over the last five to seven years, he has given up on cleaning it.

“Who wants to be driving around with a van that’s got graffiti on it?” Mr. Alexander says, leaning against the van’s open door.

“It’s not good for customers because we want customers to call in and order,” he adds. The sprawling designs on the van have long hidden the poultry shop’s phone number from view.

Mr. Alexander says his boss has been tossing around the idea of installing a fence around the St. Andrew Street parking lot that has become an unprotected barrack for delivery trucks at night. Mr. Alexander says it could be protected by motion lights, barbed wire and an electric gate to safeguard the new truck the poultry store is planning on welcoming to its fleet.

The parking lot is also home to the Oxford Fruit delivery truck on weekends. Most Monday mornings, according to Jungle Fruit owner Jeffrey Ng, his parents’ truck from Oxford Fruit greets him with a freshly painted tag.

“It’s very frustrating. My dad has to clean up every time because we’re using this truck for advertising,” Mr. Ng says. “The logo is on [it] and they keep [painting] graffiti onto the logo, and we have to find a way to get rid of it.”

Mr. Ng used to send police security footage showing vandals painting his parents’ truck, but says officers have been little help. “[Kensington] will never be clean. It will never be stopped.”

Purging the city of graffiti won’t stop artists from tagging, warns Erin Zimerman, an artistic educator and graffiti artist. He doesn’t think the relentless waves of spray-painted squiggles and blobs is all that destructive, anyway.

The more people who see it, the more valuable it is

“If kids are doing worse things like robbing each other, beating each other up, and involved in drugs and gangs and that kind of stuff — the last thing I’m going to worry about is a kid with a can of paint,” Mr. Zimerman says.

Expansive white spaces delivery trucks parade around are beacons for graffiti: “There’s something that’s like aching for it when it’s like a bright blank space,” he explains, adding that artists use vehicles to spread their names around more neighbourhoods.

“The more people who see it, the more valuable it is,” he explains.

But Mr. Dunn was fed up with parading free, illegal advertisements around the city. So, when he stumbled across artists looking for a white van to decorate for an international graffiti competition at Yonge-Dundas Square about eight years ago, he thought he could fight his spray-painting foes with a bigger and better mural.

It worked. Although he would later get rid of the van because of mechanical issues, for a short time, Mr. Dunn travelled around Toronto with “world-class art” that nobody — especially street artists — dared to touch.

Although he has been graffiti-free since getting rid of his pearly white panel van, Mr. Dunn knows he lives on taggers’ turf.

“It’s like the war on drugs,” he says. “It’s always going to be there.”

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